Copywriter Marcella Allison is the only person who has “cubbed” for the biggest names in copywriting including Parris Lampropolous, Clayton Makepeace, David Deutch and Mark Ford. And she’s learned a lot along the way. Marcella stopped by our virtual studio to chat with Rob and Kira about:
• how she got started as a copywriter (twice)
• whether copywriters can develop a talent for writing about complex things
• how an unexpected kiss from Marty Edelston transformed her career
• the importance of mentorship in building your career in copywriting
• the top lessons she learned from two of her mentors
• how to effectively use the feedback you get from a mentor, and
• the lesson David Deutch accidentally taught her about ego.
Plus, Marcella shares the “beginning painter” learning trick she recommends if you want to break into a copywriting niche. This episode is another good one you won’t want to miss. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.
Most of the people and stuff we mentioned on the show:
Sponsor: AirStory
Ry Schwartz
Brian Kurtz
F&W Publications
Schaeffer’s Investment Research
Money Map Press
David Deutch
Parris Lampropolous
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain
AWAI
Agora Financial
Kevin Addington
Bottomline
Lori Haller
Marty Edelston
Mark Ford
Clayton Makepeace
Stansbury Research
Chris Alsop
Advanced Bionutritionals
John Carlton’s Simple Copywriting System
Kevin Rogers
Ask Method
Product Launch Formula
Early to Rise
Hay House
Natural Health Sherpa
Titanides.com
Kira’s website
Rob’s website
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
Intro: Content (for now)
Outro: Gravity
Full Transcript:
The Copywriter Club Podcast is sponsored by Airstory, the writing platform for professional writers who want to get more done in half the time. Learn more at Airstory.co/club.
Kira: What if you could hang out with seriously talented copywriters and other experts, ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes and their habits then steal an idea or two to inspire your own work? That’s what Rob and I do every week at the Copywriter Club Podcast.
Rob: You’re invited to join the club for episode 48 as we chat with freelance copywriter Marcella Allison about how she became a copywriter working with A list mentors like Parris Lampropoulos and David Deutsch and her secret for landing a steady stream of clients without a website.
Kira: Marcella, welcome.
Marcella: Hi, guys. I’m going to be notorious for that now. Like everyone’s going to be like, “I can’t believe she doesn’t have her own website.” You guys are going to hear about that.
Rob: You’re actually not our first guest that didn’t have a website.
Marcella: Oh good.
Rob: At least until they got on the podcast. Ry Schwartz is a copywriter in the internet space, didn’t have a website last year when we talked to him. He does now finally so maybe this will be the spark that gets you a website, Marcella.
Kira: Or maybe you just don’t need it because you’re that good.
Marcella: I don’t know about that.
Kira: Marcella, I think a good place to start is we had met at our titans masterclass, Brian Kurtz’s group and you were my advocate during the hot seat session and I think you were the best. I forget if we called it an advocate. Basically, you were representing my needs and you were the best one there. So I oh you big time and I’m excited to dig more into how you got into copywriting and hear more about your experiences so far. So I think a good place to start is with just your story. How did you end getting into copywriting?
Marcella: Well, one thing, I have to I’ve a big shout out to Brian Kurtz because I have to say the reason I was a good advocate was I had trial by fire at his titans event being an advocate for 30 people that day.
Kira: That makes sense.
Marcella: I did have a bit of practice. I did have a bit of practice.
Kira: I did not know that. That makes sense.
Marcella: That’s a whole another podcast story, believe me. So really, I had two entry points into direct response copywriting and it’s kind of come back around full circle which is very funny. So when I graduated from college in 1987, there were no jobs for love nor money as my mother would say because we’re right in the middle of the recession and I had an English degree which was even harder to find a job. Since then, we’ve kind of come around to the idea that we’re sort of these nice, well-rounded humanitarian people. But back then nobody knew what do with an English degree.
So my first job was actually running a book club that was called The Graphic Artists Book Club for F&W Publications in Cincinnati back in 1987 and I wrote the little blurbs, these were book clubs where you got a little bulletin each month and it would tell you about the books and you would get a book auto-shipped to you every month. Even though it was called The Graphic Artists Book Club like we had maybe one or two books on doing graphic design on your computer, this was before any of these programs existed.
So I did that for maybe a year and a half and then I left direct response and I didn’t come back until 15 years later. I ended up writing copy for option traders at Schaeffer’s Investment Research. That’s sort of the start of my second career. So that was about 2003. The funny thing is that right now, I work on retainer on the financial side with the Money Map which is run by a man named Mike Ward who worked with me at F&W Publications in 1987. He was the book editor.
Rob: Wow.
Marcella: So it always comes all the way around, right, which I think is pretty funny.
Rob: Yeah, never burn a bridge. You never know.
Marcella: That’s right. But the way I got back into it was that in between time, I had done a lot of stuff. I had run a contemporary art gallery. I had gone back and gotten my MBA. I had worked as a venture capitalist. I had worked for a nonprofit. At one point, I had a friend of mine who was marketing consultant with Schaeffer’s Investment Research and he was desperately trying to find someone who understood options, sort of the math of that and the left brain side of that. Again, this was 2003 so options hadn’t really become as mainstream as they are right now. Really, Schaeffer’s was one of the only games in town in terms of newsletters that offered a substantial amount of options services.
This friend of mine was working with them and he could not find a copywriter who could understand options and translate it into copy in a way that made sense to people. So he needed someone who really could do both left brain and right brain and I think that is one of my sort of super powers is that I tend to be good at translating complicated information into something that people can understand and so that kind of became the launching of my second career in copywriting and I’ve been doing it ever since.
Rob: Marcella, would you say, maybe I already know the answer to this question, but would you say that all of those things that you did leading up to copywriting made you a better copywriter or was it just sort of a journey through all kinds of options till you found the right thing for you?
Marcella: No, I think I was really using the same skillset. I talk a lot about how ... So the venture capital firm that I worked for did early stage medical investing so I would literally be sitting down with say a scientist who might even still be in the lab at a university because we were going to be the first venture capital investment and pull that idea, right, out of the university and set it up as its own company. So I was a financial analyst. I’d be sitting there with him saying, “Okay, so explain to me how this cancer therapy works. What are all the steps,” and then I’d say, “Well, what do you do next?” He might say something like, “Oh, I go put it in a centrifuge.” “Okay, well, we’re going to need to buy one of those because you won’t be able to run over to the university and use theirs, right?”
So like I would help him understand how this thing that he was doing turned into numbers on a page that turned into a business that could then be evaluated. So when I’m working say with option traders, I’m sitting down and I’m asking them to explain to me say a very technical model of how they find a trade, right, “Well, how do you know this is going to go up? What are you looking at?” Then I’m trying to take that and turn it into something that I can translate that other people can understand and buy into. So I think that ability to sort of sit down one on one with people and understand what they’re doing, especially in finance, right, it might be this option trading model. On the health side, it might be having a deeper understanding of how inflammation works in the body and all the steps of that and how do I make that understandable to someone in such a way that they can grasp the advantage of the solution that I’m offering.
Kira: Is that a skill that we can all learn as copywriters? Or some people are just more gifted with that ability to connect and translate information or is it something that we can all learn over time?
Marcella: That’s an interesting question. When I was in my MBA program, we did this funny exercise, I’ve never been able to find it since, where you answer like 70 questions to say how left or right brained you are and then it actually turned into coordinates and we had this white painter caps and markers and we drew our brains on them and could see the people who were so left brained, it looked like an arrow, right. It was so narrow, it was like all left, right? Mine was this big square on the top of my hat. I was literally almost 50% left brained and 50% right brained. So I was like, “Oh well, that makes sense,” right, that I find a career like that.
But the people who are at the extremes, right, like an incredibly talented artist, right,
